


Storage War

by Laura Kaye (laurakaye)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Characters Writing Fanfiction, Fanfiction, Growing Up is Hard, Happy Ending, It Gets Better, M/M, Married Couple, Married Life, Pheels, an unexpected amount of feels for the concept, coming to terms with your sexuality, teenage Phil was a precious cinnamon roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 13:56:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10720662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurakaye/pseuds/Laura%20Kaye
Summary: “That’s what marriage is all about, right? For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for clearing out thirty-year-old storage units…”





	Storage War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kathar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kathar/gifts).



> Based on a Tumblr prompt from Kathar!

“You really don’t have to do this,” Phil said, hovering in the doorway.

“It’s really fine, babe,” Clint said, pulling out another box and coughing at the cloud of dust that billowed off it.

“I promise I didn’t ask you here intending to pawn off all the work. Maybe you could take a break until I—”

“Phil. It’s _fine._ It might just as well have been me getting called in.” Clint smiled at him, hoping it was reassuring. “I came to help, I’m gonna help.” He waved a hand at the storage unit, piled high with the detritus of Phil’s childhood and teenage years. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about just throwing it all in a U-Haul and driving it to New York—”

“Ugh,” Phil said. “No. We’d end up storing it for another decade before we found the time to deal with it.”

“Then let me help you,” Clint said. Reaching out, he snagged Phil’s hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, scraped a little from where he’d barked his hand on the wall trying to get the rusted padlock open. “That’s what marriage is all about, right? For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for clearing out thirty-year-old storage units…”

Phil chuckled, turning his hand to cup Clint’s cheek. “I don’t remember that part in the vows.”

“It was right before the part about worshipping each other with our bodies,” Clint said.

“Ah, my favorite part.” Phil bent to kiss him, quick and soft. “I’ll be as fast as I can.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Clint said. “I’ll have fun. Maybe if I’m lucky there’ll be baby pictures.”

Phil rolled his eyes. “More likely to be awkward, pimply middle-school pictures.”

“I bet you were adorable. Go, help catch the bad guys while I work on sorting the greatest fashion hits of the early 80s.” He reached into a nearby box and pulled out a “Frankie Says Relax” t-shirt. “I think I might take this one home.”

Phil laughed. “Just remember the size of our apartment when you’re deciding what you want to keep,” he said. “I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Sure thing.”

Clint smiled to himself as he watched Phil leave, then settled in to continue working through the massive pile of stuff. Phil had ignored the storage unit containing the contents of his mom’s house for decades; he’d still be ignoring it, if the facility wasn’t closing down, slated to give way to a new block of hipster lofts or something. So Clint, being a good partner, had taken some leave time and joined Phil in Wisconsin to deal with it.

They’d already worked through the furniture, picking out a few pieces to keep and donating the rest along with most of Phil’s mom’s clothes and personal items. What was left was mostly all Phil’s things. Honestly, Clint was kind of looking forward to going through them; he’d never known Phil as a kid, and there was something precious about seeing his carefully packed boxes of comics, the handmade quilt in red, white, and blue stars, the worn and ragged ear of a much-loved stuffed bear.

Clint had prioritized the things it would be easy to sort: outdated clothes that wouldn’t fit them, furnishings that had seen better days, an ancient cracked clock radio. The comics were easy, too, in the other direction; Clint wasn’t sure if Phil would want to keep or sell them, but he knew Phil would want to go over the collection in more detail.

He set aside a box of 8-tracks, humming Devo to himself, opened a box labeled “notebooks” in neat block print, and stuttered to a halt, blinking rapidly.

The box did contain a number of three-ring binders and spiral notebooks, but that wasn’t all; right on the top was some sort of comb-bound, copy-shop booklet which bore on the cover an overblown illustration of Captain America. Cap was tied to a post, his uniform shirt ripped to highlight his bulging muscles, and a masked Hydra goon was threatening him with a gun while cowering away from Peggy Carter, who was wearing a military uniform and brandishing a laser gun that Clint was pretty sure wasn’t historically accurate. Above Cap’s head, a hand-lettered title proclaimed the publication to be called “Rule Britannia.”

“Oh my god,” Clint said, and dove into the box with glee.

Some time later, he’d examined a remarkable number of Captain America fanzines. The earlier ones were general-purpose, with articles about Project Rebirth and the European Theater and, in one case, a painfully adorable letter from a fourteen-year-old Phil about the importance of the Howling Commandoes and Peggy Carter to the success of the SSR during the war. Later on, though, the general zines gave way to more focused ones, and Clint had to hold back his joyful giggles by main force. He’d found baby Phil’s stash of secret erotic Captain America fanfiction.

Best. Day. _Ever._

Surprisingly, Phil’s interest seemed pretty evenly split between seeing Cap with Peggy Carter and seeing him with Bucky Barnes. Clint would have predicted Carter all the way, based on Phil's deeply nerdy obsession with her (and it was deeply, _deeply_ nerdy, like, topic-of-his-graduate-thesis nerdy), but apparently Phil's appreciation for a smart-mouthed sniper was of longer duration than Clint had previously realized. 

Tempted though he was, Clint didn’t take the time to read the stories; there just wasn’t time. He contented himself with thumbing through the zines, looking for bookmarks, stray notes, or other signs that might show him which ones had been Phil’s favorites. Unfortunately, Phil seemed to have been just as meticulous then as he was now, and the zines were in remarkable condition for their age. Clint set the last of them aside in a pile and picked up one of the spiral notebooks. 

It had Cap’s shield on it, of course, and was well used, the corners worn and the spiral starting to work its way out of the top. Clint smiled, flipping open the cover. He felt a pang at the sight of younger Phil’s handwriting, recognizably similar to the way he wrote now, but more cautious, the letters formed deliberately as though Phil had been trying hard to keep it neat. Then he stopped _looking_ at the page and started _reading_ it, and he had to stop and clutch it to his chest in delight. 

Phil hadn’t just read Captain America fanfiction. He had written it. 

Clint sat his ass down on the dusty concrete floor of the storage unit and started perusing his treasure. 

Honestly, if Clint had ever considered the question he would have said that baby Phil’s stories would feature a thinly-disguised version of himself. Fictional Phil might be a previously unknown Howling Commando, or maybe some other kind of ally—a soldier, or part of the French Resistance, or a British spy—who came through in a tight spot to save Cap’s life and/or mission. (Which wasn’t really that far-fetched; it was pretty much the same kind of thing that adult Phil did for his agents now.) Possibly the stories might have ended with Cap showing his appreciation by inviting fictional Phil to bed, or at least with a manly embrace of gratitude. After all, wasn’t that was what teenage stories were for? Trying on scenarios, writing about the life you wish you had. Clint hadn’t been much for writing as a kid, but he’d sure as hell spun up enough daydreams, trying to fall asleep when it seemed like every inch of his body hurt. Daydream Clint was the star of the circus. Daydream Clint had a family who loved him. Daydream Clint had money, had a home, was the best archer in the world.

Daydream Clint had lived a life pretty much like the one Clint had now, actually, if you swapped out the circus for SHIELD. Clint kind of wished he could go back in time and tell his skinny, scared teenage self the good news. Stick with it, kid, things will turn out great for you one day.

Anyway, Clint wanted to know what Daydream Phil was like. Phil, being Phil, had helpfully dated each of his notebooks, so Clint piled them up in order, grabbed the earliest one, and started reading.

An hour later, he set the next-to-last notebook down, rubbing at his eyes. For all that Phil’s zine collection ran to happy romantic endings, the stuff Phil had actually written was pretty much the opposite. Clint knew—he’d known for years—that Phil’d had trouble as a kid, trying to reconcile his bisexuality with his dream of going into the Army. But Clint had never expected to see all of young Phil’s confusion and anger and hurt and fear projected onto stories about his boyhood hero. 

The Steve Rogers in Phil’s stories was pained and unsure, in love with Bucky and Peggy both and struggling to find a resolution that didn’t hurt either of them. The plots were pretty clichéd, and the prose was a bit overblown, but the emotions came through clearly. Steve Rogers, as Phil had seen him, felt like he had no good choices, torn between Peggy, Bucky, and his moral obligation to fight Hydra. If he went with Bucky, he lost Peggy and neglected his duty; if he went with Peggy, he lost Bucky, and felt guilty for allowing society to dictate who he loved. Just because he loved a woman, that didn’t mean he wanted his choice of partner forced by anything but himself.

Clint wondered why it had never occurred to Phil to put Captain America in a fictional ménage-à-trois. It would present a neat solution to the whole love triangle issue, at any rate. Although he supposed it was probably a lot harder to think outside that particular box in the days before the internet. Who was supposed to be the role model, _Three’s Company?_ Ugh.

The last notebook was all one, long story, and it was the most heartbreaking of all. In it, Cap was pining for his two loves as per Phil’s usual, but every other chapter was a short story where Steve imagined what would happen in a different scenario. Clint read a description of Steve and Bucky leaving the Army to live together, their happiness soured by Steve’s guilt over leaving the war. He read an account of Steve marrying Peggy and Bucky marrying someone named Lorraine. The two men set up housekeeping next door to one another, named their children after each other, while Steve tried to use his real happiness to bury the part of himself that never stopped wanting Bucky. There was a chapter where—finally—Phil had considered the possibility of polyamory, and Steve daydreamed about a life where they all got a house together, where Steve had a wife and a husband both, but even in that fantasy world they spent their time hiding, from the Army or the press or the neighbors, sending Bucky on false dates to try to keep their secret. Not one of the scenarios had a happy ending, all of them going back to the same place: Cap, alone and hopeless and pretending everything was fine.

The story ended as Cap was piloting the crashing plane, giving himself one final dream as the water rose up around him. He dreamed of Bucky being found, alive after all, and he and Peggy comforting each other. They’d be perfect for each other, Steve thought, brilliant and beautiful together, and they would have amazing children with dark wavy hair and maybe they’d name the first boy Steve. 

Clint read the final lines of the story, his chest aching.

_It was for the best, Steve thought, taking one last gasping breath before the water closed over his head. They both deserved the best. They both deserved a happy ending._

Clint closed the notebook and took a deep, shaky breath. He was not going to cry over ancient Captain America fanfiction, he wasn’t. 

He might possibly be going to cry a little over the writer, though. Thinking of Phil reading all those happily-ever-afters but never able to bring himself to write one of his own… 

“Clint? How’s it going in here?” 

Clint turned around sharply as Phil came around the corner. Shit, how long had he been reading?

“What’s wrong?” Phil asked, his smile falling away as he saw Clint’s face. “What—oh.” He looked at the pile of zines and notebooks scattered around Clint, the tips of his ears going red. “Oh god, I thought I threw those away.”

Clint dropped the notebook and scrambled to his feet, crossing the cramped space in a few strides and wrapping his arms around Phil, holding him tight. After a moment, he felt Phil’s arms come up around him, as well, and Phil patted Clint’s shoulder tentatively.

“Are you okay?” Phil asked quietly, brushing a kiss over Clint’s ear.

Clint sniffled. “I’m fine, I just—Phil. The happiest ending you could think of was Steve dying so that Peggy and Bucky could marry _each other?_ I feel like I need to go back in time and make sure Teenage You is okay.”

Phil was quiet, his arms tightening around Clint. “Oh,” he said, softly. “Yeah. I was… things were tough, when I was writing those.”

“I could tell. When I found the box, I thought it was going to be cute, you know? Funny.” Clint nestled his head into the crook of Phil’s neck, taking comfort in the familiar bergamot and sandalwood scent of his aftershave. “I thought I’d get to tease you a little, maybe. I never thought you’d be into writing tragedies.”

“I was a melodramatic kid,” Phil said. “I had a girlfriend, and I loved her, but I also had a wicked crush on a guy I was on swim team with, plus I wanted to go into the Army… I felt like every choice I had was wrong somehow, like no matter what I did I’d end up unhappy.” He stroked his hand down Clint’s spine, heavy and reassuring. “If I’d known then how my life would turn out, those stories would have probably been really different.”

“Yeah?” Clint made himself pull back enough to see Phil’s face.

“Absolutely,” Phil said, and pressed a tender, lingering kiss to Clint’s mouth. “All I would have needed to see is you.”

“That you ended up with a husband?”

“That I ended up with a happy ending,” Phil said, and Clint had to kiss him again until they were both breathless.

They ended up taking the box back to New York, where it found a new home in the back of a closet. The story kept nagging at Clint, at odd moments here and there, until finally he scrawled a new chapter in the back of a steno pad. Steve woke up in a hospital; Bucky and Peggy were both there to welcome him, too, holding hands with him and with each other. The war was won, Hydra was gone, and they were all free to start their new life together. Clint felt kind of silly about it, but also like he owed Phil’s long-ago self some kind of resolution.

Plus, the story as it stood was just too fucking goddamned tragic to bear.

When he opened the box to stick the steno pad in, he pulled up short at the sight of something bright blue. He picked it up; it was a sheet of blue cardstock, and mounted in the middle of it was one of the photos from Clint and Phil’s wedding. They were dancing, looking into each others’ eyes. They looked devoted and intent, blissfully in love.

At the bottom of the page, there was a message in Phil’s neat, blocky handwriting.

_And they lived happily ever after._


End file.
